In the News

Wall Street Journal

May 09, 2018

Data science shouldn’t be confined to mathematicians, says CIO Jeff Keisling. Pfizer Inc. leverages Alation as part of its recently-built analytics platform to help employees from different divisions within the company collaborate in an effort to identify patients with rare diseases that might previously have gone undiagnosed.

TechTarget

Feb 06, 2018

“The Alation software helps you look at query logs,” said Maksim Pecherskiy, chief data officer for the City of San Diego. “It also provides a web interface that supports self-service for users.” Having such an “abstraction layer across the diverse systems” is an essential element in the City of San Diego’s open data initiative, he […]

CIO

Feb 02, 2018

“The new dumping ground of data — data lakes — has gone through experimental deployments over the last few years, and will start to be shut down unless they prove that they can deliver value,” says Ken Hoang, vice president of strategy and alliances at data catalog specialist Alation. “The hallmark for a successful data […]

Datanami

Feb 01, 2018

“Alation is the consistent interface, no matter where that data lies,” says Stephanie McReynolds, VP of marketing at Alation. “That reduces the boundaries or the barriers for analysts and data scientists to access that data. They don’t have to be concerned about, on a day by day basis, where data sets have been moved to. […]

ChannelBuzz

Jan 17, 2018

San Francisco-based Alation has made a significant move to develop its channel strategy with the appointment of Ken Hoang as vice president of strategy and alliances. Hoang has been putting together a strategy and infrastructure to support a select channel of systems integrators and vendor partners, to significantly broaden Alation’s go-to-market capabilities and extend its […]

Forbes

Nov 28, 2017

Since these algorithms are “garbage in, garbage out” and since the results of garbage-output are becoming ever more consequential, high quality training data will become a coveted resource, like oil for the information age. The sharpest human minds in tech may even shift their attention from creating algorithms to feeding those algorithms the best data […]

DZone

Nov 02, 2017

With this integration, Alation’s AI-powered data catalog automatically inventories how hundreds to thousands of users in your organization are using analytics today. Alation automatically generates a social catalog page for every asset in Einstein Analytics, increasing the transparency of analytic usage in the organization.

Database Trends and Applications

Oct 10, 2017

Alation Inc., the collaborative data company, is updating its platform with increased support for chief data officers looking to manage their data as an asset. Alation 5.0 will include new features and a services package to make data asset valuation simple by promoting the adoption of Infonomics.

siliconANGLE

Oct 10, 2017

“The thing we’ve observed, a lot of people in the data space are concerned about the data itself. We’re really concerned with the human side of it. Data is only valuable if it’s used by people,” said Aaron Kalb, head of product at Alation Inc.

ZDNet

Oct 02, 2017

Making file system and streaming data more directly accessible has been a holy grail, especially for organizations looking at cloud deployment. Now that Amazon has opened the door to S3 cloud storage with Athena and Redshift Spectrum, Alation is expanding its data catalog to offer similar access that can extend to hybrid environments.

Database Trends and Applications

Sep 30, 2017

Alation and Paxata have announced a partnership and integration to simplify the establishment of trust in the data lake. Alation is a provider of software for collaborative data cataloging to enable analysts and information stewards to search, query and collaborate for faster, more accurate insights.

Constellation Research

Aug 09, 2017

Alation is one of two solutions named in the Constellation ShortList. Constellation evaluates over a dozen solutions categorized in this market. The Constellation ShortList is determined by client inquiries, partner conversations, customer references, vendor selection projects, market share, and internal research.

VentureBeat

Jul 18, 2017

Alation, which provides software that allows businesses to have a single source of reference for their data, today announced funding of $23 million, in a round led by Icon Ventures. New investor Harmony Partners, as well as existing investors Costanoa Ventures and Data Collective, also joined.

Datanami

Jul 18, 2017

Super-fast processors and snappy visualizations may elicit “oohs” and “ahhs” from the big data masses. But here’s the thing: the best analytics setup isn’t worth a dime if you can’t find the right data to analyze in the first place. That was the discovery that Alation made when it created the data catalog product category two years ago, and it continues to be the company’s focus going forward.

IT Business Edge

May 31, 2017

Arthur Cole of ITBusinessEdge published an article on how self-service puts the power of infrastructure into the hands of those who can best make the use of it, and referenced a quote from Stephanie’s insideBIGDATA byline where she advised organizations to incorporate data curation as a key element to any self-service data environment.

siliconANGLE

May 23, 2017

Aaron Melgar of siliconANGLE published an interview John Furrier of theCUBE had with Satyen Sangani at SAP Sapphire Now conference that discusses how processing data can help improve the quality of data to ensure high-quality analytics and processing.

CRN

May 01, 2017

The Alation data catalog system combines elements of machine learning with human insight to create an inventory of an organization’s data assets, helping data-driven businesses more easily find, understand, use and govern their data for making faster and better decisions.

Solutions Review

Apr 24, 2017

Alation’s Head of Product Aaron Kalb concludes: “With our new SDK, Alation offers the first embeddable data catalog browser for analytical tools, and a hassle-free implementation that brings the power of a collaborative data catalog directly into the workflow of the data consumer. We’re excited to be working closely with MicroStrategy and making it simpler than ever for our joint customers to discover and share data knowledge.”

insideBIGDATA

Apr 24, 2017

MicroStrategy, a leading worldwide provider of enterprise analytics and mobility software, announced that MicroStrategy 10 is now integrated with Alation Data Explorer, the search and discovery interface of collaborative data company Alation. With this integration, customers have access to a data catalog directly within the MicroStrategy interface and can seamlessly conduct self-service enterprise data discovery and analytics in the MicroStrategy platform, enabling them to make faster, data-driven business decisions.

Database Trends and Applications

Apr 18, 2017

MicroStrategy 10’s integration with Alation Data Explorer provides a collaborative data catalog for data discovery and governance to a broader set of users, thereby increasing the impact and value of data. This integration leverages Alation’s new software development kit (SDK) to embed its enterprise data search and discovery capabilities into MicroStrategy.

InformationWeek

Jan 04, 2017

Alation’s collaboration tools also enable users to comment on particular data sources, effectively annotating data sources to identify what is most useful and guide other users. This is especially useful for the 80% of GoDaddy’s internal BI users who aren’t technologists or data experts. They are just looking for the answers they need to make their products better.

Techseen

Nov 29, 2016

For a long time, companies threw away data because they had too much to process. With Hadoop, they can process lots of data, but the data isn’t generally organised in a way that can be found. Metadata catalogs can help users discover and understand relevant data worth analyzing using self-service tools. This gap in customer need is being filled by companies like Alation, which uses machine learning to automate the work of finding data in Hadoop.

insideBIGDATA

Nov 07, 2016

We also learned of new products, services and solutions starting with Alation, Inc., the collaborative data company, announced the planned Q4 release of a new product, Alation Tableau Edition and selection as strategic Technology Partner for data governance. The new Alation product, with deep integration with Tableau Server, supports a new approach to no-risk, self-service analytics. Together, Alation and Tableau embrace the freedom and speed of self-service analytics with the trust in data that comes from consistent enforcement of data governance best practices.

Digital Enterprise Journal

Nov 01, 2016

Digital Enterprise Journal (DEJ) attended Strata + Hadoop conference in New York and had a chance to discuss trends in Big Data, analytics and data management with number of vendors and user organizations. Also, we were able to append insights from the conference with findings of our Digital Transformation research and recently launched Big Data Analytics and Management survey. Here is a summary of our key takeaways.

insideBIGDATA

Oct 25, 2016

Alation helps organizations using Tableau Server to fully embrace self-service analytics while lowering the barriers to user compliance with data governance policies,” said Satyen Sangani, CEO of Alation. “We’re excited about Tableau’s new APIs because they will enable us to further enhance our joint customers’ experience by surfacing more data governance related information directly to Tableau users from within their data visualizations.”

Datanami

Oct 03, 2016

Another vendor that’s plying the fruitful waters of data cataloging is Alation. The company originally designed its product to “learn” about data connections by observing how analysts interact. But just providing data cataloging wasn’t enough, the company says. So last week Alation announced that in its version 4.0 update, it will also track queries that run along with the data that’s collected.

Forbes

Oct 02, 2016

Alation (www.alation.com) offers a data catalog that centralizes knowledge about a company’s data and how to use them. The disruption: Alation treats queries, reports, workflows and other activities or tasks as objects that people can create, use, reuse, and string together. Business users can thus discover and display data on a self-service basis, while data stewards can manage the objects to ensure accuracy and compliance.

SD Times

Sep 29, 2016

Alation is giving businesses the ability to catalog queries from IBM Watson DataWorks, Presto and Spark SQL with the new release of Alation Data Catalog. Version 4.0 uses machine learning algorithms to automatically catalog queries and track patterns in order to help users understand data.

Enterprise Apps Today

Sep 29, 2016

Alation, which builds a data catalog for collaboration, announced the upcoming release of its Alation Data Catalog 4.0 with Alation Connect. The Alation Connect capability enables queries from popular compute engines, including the Presto SQL query engine and SparkSQL.”With the introduction of Alation Connect, we catalog queries alongside reports, dashboards and data,” Satyen Sangani, Alation’s CEO, said in a statement.

TechTarget

Sep 28, 2016

Which tools should you consider to meet your particular governance needs? To assist your data governance program in narrowing down the choices, let’s examine the leading tools in the market from 10 vendors, applying the usage scenarios and product categories from our previous articles.

IBM Big Data & Analytics Hub

Sep 27, 2016

In a world of complexity, governance is about teaching people how to use data, not just proving compliance by adherence to workflows. You can print only so many driving manuals before it becomes apparent that traffic signs are the real solution. At Alation, we took these hypotheticals and ideally tried to craft them in to a solution that addresses these requirements for customers of IBM DataWorks. Learn more about Alation and Alation Connect.

InformationWeek

Sep 27, 2016

Forrester said that over half of the decision-makers polled said that their firms will increase MDM-as-a-service in the coming year. Who are some of the vendors that these customers will turn to for master data management and other data management solutions? Here’s a list of 25 data management companies, old and new, big and small, in alphabetical order, that can help organizations wrangle their data in an increasingly complex environment.

TechTarget

Sep 21, 2016

Alation Data Catalog 3.8 serves as the central point of reference for data scattered across an organization and comes with tools for governance, discovery and analysis. Alation Inc.’s Data Catalog integrates with a wide range of data sources, including Hive, MySQL, IBM, Oracle, Tableau and Teradata, enabling it to import and index metadata from disparate repositories in one place.

Dataconomy

Sep 19, 2016

Dataconomy: What is a data catalog? Satyen: Much like Amazon helps users buy the right product, a data catalog helps people get the right data. A good data catalog provides rich information on all data within an organization, so members can find a relevant data set, understand what it means and where it came from, trust that it’s accurate and up-to-date, and then put it to use.

insideBIGDATA

Sep 12, 2016

Alation, Inc., the collaborative data company, and Teradata, a leading analytics solutions company, announced the general availability of Alation’s collaborative data catalog on the Teradata Unified Data Architecture™ (UDA) for greater database and Hadoop connectivity. Now, with extended connection to the Teradata UDA, Alation catalogs queries run through Teradata QueryGrid™ and Teradata Aster® Analytics.

Datamation

Aug 09, 2016

Big Data companies come in many different shapes and flavors. In fact you might say, a list of Big Data companies necessarily contains vendors with highly contrasting strategies – clearly, the analytics market is in rapid flux. So, which tools and platforms should you choose? Here are 25 of the top companies to consider in the Big Data world.

Constellation Research

Jul 14, 2016

The report explores three areas where commercial vendors are filling gaps in the Hadoop stack: data management and governance, data cataloging and metadata management, and data discovery and self-service data prep. These three gaps are being filled by two camps of vendors that are complementing what’s available in Hadoop.

O'Reilly

Jul 11, 2016

Automated big data governance is certainly the goal, said Ben Harden. The answer of whether it is possible depends on whether anyone is willing to make the initial investments. There are a number of players and tools that are moving in that direction, he says, including Alation, Collibra, FINRA’s open source governance tool Herd, and LinkedIn’s open source data discovery and lineage portal, WhereHows.

insideBIGDATA

Jul 11, 2016

Prowling the halls at Hadoop Summit we also heard that Alation, Inc., the collaborative data company, announced certification of its Alation platform with the Hortonworks Data Platform™ (HDP) and interoperability with Apache Tez™, the popular processing engine for Apache Hadoop™. Now analysts can more easily find and understand data in Hadoop using Alation for increased productivity and maximization of enterprise Hadoop investments.

Datanami

Jun 17, 2016

In the consumer world, many companies like Fitbit (NYSE: FIT) and LinkedIn (NYSE: LNKD) learn from people’s behavior to help train other people to behave better. My co-founders and I asked the question: could you do the same thing in the realm of analysis? Could you use machine learning to observe behavior of analysts, ultimately using those observations to improve how their colleagues use data?

TechTarget

Jun 07, 2016

Some data governance platforms are adapted from prior incarnations of data management tools, while others are new and tuned to data governance from the ground up. While obtaining the functionality needed to support your data governance program is more important than buying a particular type of tool, in general, you can look at data governance software across the following three categories:

Datanami

May 31, 2016

Earlier this year, [Gartner] predicted that the self-service data preparation software market would reach $1 billion by 2019, and that the current adoption rate of 5 percent would grow to 10 percent by 2020. Other analysts firms also noted the acceleration in the segment, including Forrester, which will be publishing its first Forrester Wave analyst report on self-service data prep tools later this year.

CRN

May 02, 2016

Alation exited stealth last year, debuting its enterprise data-accessibility platform that’s designed to help people more easily find, understand, use and govern their data for making faster and better decisions. Alation said its platform combines elements of machine learning with human insight to capture information about what the data describes, where it comes from, who’s using it and how it’s being used.

Datanami

Mar 14, 2016

Thought leaders from Silicon Valley to Washington to DC are rightly excited by the prospect of a future in which data science, statistics, and analytics play a larger role in the the shaping of public policy and discourse. But before computers can process large volumes of data to identify correlations, perform classifications, or generate predictive models, humans need to furnish them with appropriate data sets and understand the meaning of the raw data.

Enterprise Apps Today

Mar 14, 2016

One of the biggest trends in Big Data analytics is making data more accessible to business users, so they can make business decisions with little if any input from data scientists and other data specialists. Many companies are springing up to meet this need, including these five interesting Big Data analytics startups. Their approaches are different, but they share a common goal: Make Big Data easier for business users to find, access, analyze and use.

O'Reilly

Mar 09, 2016

The debate between advocates of artificial intelligence (AI) and defenders of human-centric approaches presents a false dichotomy. Machines can certainly help solve the problems facing humans, but they can rarely do so alone. To be most effective, machines must learn from people and about people.

CWRU Observer

Feb 03, 2016

Teradata has partnered with Alation, Inc. to re-sell the Alation Data Catalog to Teradata customers and prospects struggling to achieve trust in data – in those data environments that have grown more complex with big data. The exponential growth of data by volume and type is making it necessary to provide referential resources for collaboration among enterprise users.

MarTech Advisor

Jan 28, 2016

Teradata, a marketing application and big data analytics firm, has announced a strategic alliance with Alation Inc., a collaborative data firm. The alliance is aimed at delivering collaborative data catalogs to enhance reliability in data to self-service analytics. Collaborative data catalogs link systems, data and people, collecting both organizational and technical information about internal data in one accessible location.

Database Trends and Applications

Jan 28, 2016

Teradata is entering a strategic partnership with Alation to provide a data catalog that will help users to take advantage of self-service analytics. According to both companies, data catalogs are useful in building trust because they connect the dots between data, systems, and people, and present both technical information and organizational knowledge about internal data in a single, accessible place.

CMSWire

Jan 27, 2016

It’s rare when a nine-month-old startup is invited to partner with a tech behemoth. But collaborative data pioneer Alation, which came out of stealth last March, and data management analytics stalwart Teradata are going to market together now.

CNNMoney

Jan 27, 2016

Teradata has partnered with Alation, Inc. to re-sell the Alation Data Catalog to Teradata customers and prospects struggling to achieve trust in data – in those data environments that have grown more complex with big data. The exponential growth of data by volume and type is making it necessary to provide referential resources for collaboration among enterprise users.

siliconANGLE

Jan 12, 2016

Preparing data for analysis in the age of Big Data, with multiple data types and sources and severe time restraints, are radically different than traditional extract, transform load (ETL) procedures that have existed for a long time. In his second Alert, “Informatica & Integration vs Specialization & the Rest”, Gilbert goes into greater depth, providing notes on the leading choices, starting with individual tools such as Alation, Inc.

Enterprise Apps Today

Jan 04, 2016

“A variety of tools will come in to the self-service mainstream, including data catalogs to help people discover data, data preparation tools to help people manipulate data and advanced analytical packages to help people leverage the power of data for discovery and prediction,” Sangani said.

The Register

Jan 03, 2016

The three driving trends forcing change during the year have been flash, the cloud, and multiple forms of storage SW aimed at fixing silo sprawl and other ills. It has been one of the most challenging years in history for storage suppliers, one of the most creative for storage startups, and a difficult one for customers.

DATAVERSITY

Dec 28, 2015

2016 is now upon us and many data professionals are discussing what they think are the next big trends on the horizon. Alation, the creators of a powerful enterprise collaborative data platform, recently asked some of their executives and co-founders about such changes.

CRN recognizes Alation as 1 of the 10 Coolest Big Data Startups of 2015. This year has seen a wave of big data startups exit stealth mode and debut their groundbreaking technologies. Here’s a look at 10 startups that caught CRN’s attention this year.

Database Trends and Applications

Oct 07, 2015

The most powerful solutions “are the ones that just remove the barriers between the time that a business person has a question and acquiring the data that can answer that question,” Alation’s Sangani added. “We’re finding progressive CIOs at modern digital companies such as eBay and Square alongside traditional grocers, auto manufacturers, pharmaceuticals, and banks doing the exact same thing.”

Forbes

Sep 25, 2015

Alation believes that the end-user needs help in not only finding data but also in finding people who know about data. Alation draws inspiration not from traditional data dictionaries but from platforms like LinkedIn, Quora and StackExhange. The idea is that as people use data, the catalog should get smarter and make better recommendations.

siliconANGLE

Aug 17, 2015

Stephanie McReynolds, VP of marketing, Alation, Inc., talked with John Furrier and Dave Vellante of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE’s Media production team, at the HP Big Data Conference 2015. “The value that analytics teams are getting out of this product is really being able to access their data in human context,” McReynolds said.

Live Science

Aug 10, 2015

Sangani spent nearly a decade at Oracle following positions with the Texas Pacific Group and Morgan Stanley & Co. This Op-Ed is part of a series provided by the World Economic Forum Technology Pioneers, class of 2015. Sangani contributed this article to Live Science’s Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights.

Diginomica

Jul 22, 2015

Is analytics the province of specialists, or are we in dire need of broader analytics adoption? Alation CEO and co-founder Satyen Sangani is in the broad adoption camp – he’s staked his company on it. Here’s why.

CRN

Jul 22, 2015

Alation offers a new software platform designed to empower people inside enterprises to easily find, understand, and use the right data for fast, informed decisions. Alation’s technology uses a combination of machine learning and human insight to gather contextual knowledge about a company’s data and its data systems.

Search Data Management

Jun 30, 2015

“We now have the foundations for non-technical people to get up to speed,” he said. “We’re already seeing more engagement from, for example, product managers – ones who just don’t want to spend from four to eight hours a day writing queries.”

CMSWire

Jun 17, 2015

End users really don’t care about Hadoop or most other technologies that don’t face them. What’s important is to get data based answers to their questions and insights into their business so that they can make decisions. And they want these now, not after you define and design your big data architecture, select your tools, train your team…

Channel Insider

Jun 10, 2015

Alation, a data accessibility company, and Altiscale, a provider of Hadoop-as-a-service, announced a strategic partnership to help businesses generate faster insights from large volumes of data. The partnership leverages Alation’s data accessibility platform with Altiscale’s Hadoop Data Cloud to deliver collaborative analytics.

Federal Computer Week

May 04, 2015

And another firm in Silicon Valley is emerging to help companies deal with big-data problems. But instead of consulting on individual projects, venture capital-backed Alation offers its product in the form of software as a service.

VentureBeat

Apr 12, 2015

A senior banker – let’s call him Jack — was on a conference call attempting to close out an acquisition. The stakes were high. It was a multibillion-dollar deal and the negotiation of the final price hinged on the measurement of the target’s EBITDA, the Earnings Before Interest, Taxes, Depreciation, and Amortization. Jack argued that […]

DATAVERSITY

Apr 09, 2015

The movement towards self-service data access, integration, and analytics is at the core of the growing trend of empowering business users and utilizing data-centric processes to influence business and operations across vertical industries. Subsequently, there are more tools, databases, and data sources for analysts or business users to examine to purportedly influence decision making and […]

Bloor Research

Apr 07, 2015

Alation, from the company of the same name, is an interesting product. The company calls it a ”data accessibility platform“ in the sense of making data accessible to users rather than in the sense of disabled accessibility, but in any case it isn’t exactly clear what ”making data accessible to users“ means.